Arquivo da tag: camboja

If China can impose its will in the South China Sea, at least five rival claimants—all much smaller, weaker Asian states—will be limited to a narrow band of the sea along their coastlines. China would gain greater security for its crucial supply lines of oil and other commodities; exclusive access to rich fishing areas and potentially vast undersea oil deposits; a much larger buffer against what it regards as U.S. naval intrusions; and, not least, the prestige and standing it has long sought, becoming in effect the Pacific’s hegemon, and positioning itself to press its decades-old demand that Taiwan come under its control. Arguably, it would achieve the greatest territorial expansion by any power since imperial Japan’s annexation of large swaths of Asia in the first half of the 20th century.

Perched on the 2,700-mile border with Russia, the Chinese city of Manzhouli has acquired the flavour of its northern neighbour. Gilded domes gleam and buildings are adorned with white icing flourishes. Shoppers pay for fur coats in roubles and dine on borscht and salmon.

Although Ms. Yang might be best known for her Oscar-winning work, “The Blood of Yingzhou District,” released in 2006, she had already earned a reputation before that as an astute chronicler of young people caught in the middle of societies in flux.

At a contract coffee bean roasting plant in a suburb north of Bangkok, Masato Egami, managing director of Thai Ishimitsu, was sampling different cups of coffee lined up on a table, one after another. He then exchanged opinions with young technical experts dispatched from Japan and with a Thai official who runs the plant.

More and more manga are coming out with titles that refer to being alone or having no friends, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The solitary protagonists are unexpectedly tough and content in these types of manga, which may be described as “botchi-kei” (alone type) works.

“Botchi” is an abbreviation of “hitoribotchi” (all alone). Most botchi-kei manga are set in schools, an indication that the authors are targeting young readers, mainly middle and high school students.

In 2009, when I visited Brazil and Thailand, young people there frequently told me about the group. They all said the group was marvelous, and at the time I thought people overseas were less informed about Japanese music than Japanese anime. But I was wrong again. They were more aware of the essence of Japanese music than I was.

The spark of the Umbrella Revolution is political: Demonstrators want Beijing to grant Hong Kongers a free and direct election of the chief executive in 2017. But the passions that have driven people into the streets are rooted in the desire to preserve a distinct identity from China — in areas like rule of law, freedom of speech and of the press, financial infrastructure, anticorruption institutions, education, Cantonese language and Western influence.

There are more than forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country—nearly three times the number of McDonald’s outlets.

The restaurants, connected by Chinese-run bus companies to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, make up an underground network—supported by employment agencies, immigrant hostels, and expensive asylum lawyers—that reaches back to villages and cities in China, which are being abandoned for an ideal of American life that is not quite real.

Shuji Nakamura, now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, spent 20 years at Nichia Corp., a Japanese company based in Tokushima prefecture that specializes in lighting products. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published in 2004, he described himself as a typical Japanese salaryman, devoting himself entirely to the company.